Automated estimating inside Torque360

Mechanica works inside Torque360. When the technician finishes the inspection, the priced jobs land on the same repair order, and the advisor opens a ticket that is already built.

Key takeaways

• Mechanica works inside Torque360 today.
• Torque360 already wires inspection, estimate and repair order into one path.
• The manual step is creating the estimate, which sits in the middle of that path, and that is the step Mechanica drafts.
• Nothing reaches a customer without somebody at the shop sending it.

What does Mechanica do inside Torque360?

A technician finishes the inspection and marks it complete. Mechanica reads the findings and scopes them into jobs. Labor comes from the shop's own canned jobs where one matches, and from published book time where none does. Parts are quoted at the shop's own suppliers and marked up the shop's way. The draft lands on the repair order and waits for an advisor.

What does the Torque360 workflow look like?

A clean line from the inspection to the invoice. Torque360's repair order page describes technicians performing an inspection, recording findings and attaching photos or videos to the repair order. An advisor then builds an estimate using labor guides and parts pricing alongside those findings. The page says a shop can "Convert approved estimates into active RO's in one click", and completed repair orders turn into invoices "without rebuilding the job."

Parts sourcing sits inside the same screen. Advisors can source through PartsTech, Nexpart and Epicor without leaving the repair order, and Torque360 says selected parts "flow directly into the job with pricing and availability attached."

Where is the manual step?

In the middle, where it always is.

Look at the sequence. The inspection is captured for you. The conversion from approved estimate to repair order is one click. The invoice comes out of the completed repair order with nothing retyped. Every step is automated except the one that takes the longest.

Building the estimate by hand means reading what the technician wrote, working out which repairs those findings call for, choosing the right operation for each, deciding which parts the repair needs, pricing them, applying the markup and writing the description a customer will read. That is a person at a keyboard, and on a busy Tuesday it is the same person who is supposed to be selling work on the phone.

The parts question is the one that hides. A catalog tells you what a part costs once somebody knows to ask for it. Knowing that this particular repair also wants a gasket, a seal and bolts nobody reuses comes from the procedure, and an advisor working from a two-line finding is guessing at that list. Guessing low means a call from the bay on Thursday. Guessing high means a customer paying for parts that go back in the bin.

What does a drafted estimate change?

The starting state. Instead of an empty estimate, the priced jobs are already there.

The shop's own canned jobs get matched before anything else happens, so the hours and the wording are yours. Anything with no template gets published book time looked up against the exact year, make and engine. Parts get quoted at your own supplier accounts with your markup applied. A part nobody could price carries an explicit flag where a dollar amount would sit, because a zero on a customer-facing estimate is a number somebody has to walk back.

Each line names its source, so the why question gets answered on the phone instead of after a callback. The estimate provenance entry covers what that means in practice.

Does the shop type change anything?

The drafting rules stay the same. Torque360 sells into tire shops, mobile mechanics, RV repair and motorcycle work as well as general auto repair, and the sequence is identical on all of them.

What changes is how much your own library already covers. A tire shop repeats a narrow set of jobs constantly, so its canned job library carries most of the ticket and the lookups are rare. A general repair shop sees a longer tail, so more of a draft comes out of published book time. Both are fine. Canned job vs labor guide time covers which one should win and when.

What does setup ask for?

A Torque360 login with the permissions a new advisor would get, then a pass over how the shop quotes: labor rate, markup rules, the canned job library, which supplier your counter calls first.

The library is the piece that repays preparation. Torque360 keeps labor rates attached to the repair order through the job, which is the right design and it means a wrong rate follows a ticket all the way to the invoice. Check the rate on your most-sold jobs before anything else. The canned job audit worksheet covers the rest.

Where should you read next?

Shops weighing this one usually have Shop Boss and AutoLeap on the same shortlist. A heavy-duty or fleet shop is more likely comparing it against Fullbay. Mechanica works inside all three. The integrations hub lists every system it works with, the Tekmetric page lists the ticket shapes the engine handles, and the vocabulary lives in the glossary.